With tattoos, Swifties are sure to never forget Taylor Swift’s Soldier Field shows last summer

Taylor Swift fans packed Soldier Field last June for the night of their lives, clad in glitter, cowboy hats and friendship bracelets.

Since then, some Swifties have gone for a permanent Swift-inspired memory: a tattoo.

“A lot of thought goes into what goes on your body, but I’ve been a fan for 18 years, so it wasn’t a hard decision to do something for Taylor,” said Cassandra McNeill, 41, a Swiftie who made a tattoo appointment the day after seeing Swift perform in Chicago.

McNeill, who moved from the Chicago area to Wisconsin last year, had grown close with her husband’s sister Shana McNeill, and the two saw Swift at Soldier Field last summer. They treated it as an introduction into their own new era after Shana McNeill’s husband’s death and the grieving that followed.

Provided

“We both always loved Taylor, but it became something deeper, a way of healing,” she says. “We wanted to do something monumental. Taylor got us through all of this.”

The two now have a moon-and-Saturn design in the shape of a cat — a nod to a line in Swift’s song “seven.”

“Love you to the moon and to Saturn.”

That’s also in recognition of their love of cats, which Swift happens to share as well. Each woman got her own favorite lyrics tattooed as well: “You are what you love” for Cassandra McNeill, “Long story short, I survived” for Shana McNeill.

Provided

Provided

Swift fans often connect their experiences to her lyrics, something Swift has said is intentional in the songwriting process. They latch onto certain phrases and apply them to their lives, and many who get Swift-inspired tattoos say they aren’t just for the singer, they’re for the people who share in their love for her music.

Rachel Thornburg, 28, hears the song “Sweet Nothing” off of Swift’s “Midnights” album and is reminded of her relationship with her mom.

“She says the lyric, ‘To you I can admit, I’m just too soft for all of it,’ and my mom just knows that about me,” says Thornburg, who lives in Pilsen. “It’s comforting to know that someone is knowing and understanding you but loving you, maybe even the parts that aren’t so easy to love.”

Provided

The lyric “I’m just too soft for all of it” now decorates Thornburg’s arm, surrounding an anatomical heart with flowers blooming out of it. When selecting the heart design, she thought back to nursing school, when she applied different metaphors to learning about the heart, the sustaining force of life.

“It was a very poetic understanding of something scientific and cellular, and that’s what the song is kind of about,” she says.

Thornburg got the tattoo with her sister, who now has a snowflake tattoo in honor of Swift’s “Snow on the Beach (featuring Lana Del Rey).” They went to the concert the next day after scoring last-minute tickets, and Thornburg says it was “the moment of a lifetime.”

Provided

Provided

Another Swift fan left the chances of her ink up to fate. As her Eras Tour made its way across the United States, a trend revealed itself on TikTok. Fans would film themselves trying to guess Swift’s “surprise songs,” the acoustic portion of the show in which she switches up two songs each night. They’d promise to do outlandish things if they guessed the right songs, and most times they didn’t.

But Kira Watson did. She vowed to get a tattoo if Swift played “Hits Different” on night 3 of the Chicago part of the tour. As the concert approached, Watson, 29, a teacher who made the trip to Chicago for the show from her home in Ontario, had a feeling she would be hearing “Hits Different.”

Provided

“I was so bound and determined that she was going to play it as one of the surprise songs and especially that weekend, as it came that she hadn’t played it yet,” Watson says. “I just knew.”

Turned out Watson was right. So she has just commemorated the night by getting tattooed with the song’s line “Hits different ’cause it’s you” along with the date of the concert.

Tattoos logo

A Sun-Times series on the stories behind body art.